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Each educator will create a personal learning plan that
addresses his or her need to grow, stressing knowledge
and skills related to improved student learning.
Dennis Sparks
To provide opportunities for students to be adequately prepared for their careers the system of Higher Education in Ukraine should bring about reforms. Administrators, teachers, students, parents are to redefine the rules, roles, relationships, responsibilities and research.
Students are to become the focus of all activities. They all become active learners. The ability to continue to learn in an ever-changing world is a requisite skill in an information and knowledge society. To achieve this end requires a belief in lifelong learning. It also recognizes that students must learn to work alone, in pairs, in teams to gather, examine, manipulate, evaluate and apply information. Teacher-driven curriculum must be redirected toward student-centered curriculum where students become more accountable for their own learning.
To attain these goals “teacher becomes a pedagogical and disciplinary resource, coach and mentor. ” We can make things better by defining the problem, brainstorming possible solutions, agreeing on the best solution and putting it into action. Thus such skills as: critical-thinking, decision-making, conflict solving, research, discussion and analytical skills become of paramount importance. Students are to become critical and independent thinkers.
Language learning activities are a useful technique for guiding the language learners towards better and easier communication. Students perform better when they know the goal, see models, and know how their performance compares to a standard. The lesson needs to be learner – centered but still teacher - controlled. To maintain discipline the teacher needs to agree with the class on a set of class rules: not using their mother tongue, being ready to participate in all kinds of activities etc.
If students are involved in the decision-making process, then there is less possibility of problem starting. The teacher needs to be able to anticipate discipline problems before they happen and get out of control. When students have lots of spoken practice in team work activities, it is necessary to move around the class, to look and listen, to spot students who need help or students who are getting too noisy.
Good discipline is often seen by other teachers as silence in class. But students can be thinking about something completely different So teachers should be wary of silence. On the other hand noise in the classroom is obviously a problem. We should differentiate between “naughty noise” and “busy noise”. We don’t want “naughty noise” when students are doing something they should not be doing. However “busy noise” is a natural part of communicative language learning.
The classroom described today can be characterized as: a training ground for mastery of immediate and future language use; an observatory from which teacher and learners look out into the world in order to gather data which is brought into the classroom; a laboratory in which that information is worked upon through “experiments and research”;and a studio for text production and project production (learners in all language classrooms produce texts in response at some point or another to data input.)
Working in such classrooms teachers need to:
v encourage and accept student autonomy and initiative
v use raw data and primary sources, along with manipulative, interactive and physical materials
v allow student responses to drive lessons, shift strategies, alter content
v encourage student inquiry by asking thoughtful, open-ended questions
v seek elaboration of students’ initial responses
v engage students in experiences which cause disequilibrium i.e. that might lead to contradictions to their initial hypothesis
v allow wait time (7second rule) after posing questions
v nurture students’ natural curiosity through repeated discovery, concept introduction, concept application.
To make students feel good about themselves teachers shouldn’t do all talking and correcting in the class. We must be supportive and encouraging in correction. A good approach to correction is to guide the learners to finding the right words for themselves. Do it by encouraging self-correction, give the learners who make mistakes a prompt or provide them with signals that something should be corrected, however, letting the correcting to learners themselves. If they can’t, then ask if anyone else in the class can offer a correction. Correcting written works can be approached in similar ways. First teach the class a code that you will use when correcting their writing. For example, /T/ for wrong tense, or /G/ for wrong grammar, or /WO/ for wrong word order. So the mistakes are underlined and coded. Then in class the learners try to correct their own work. Self and peer correction allows the learners to think for themselves as learning from mistakes is a valuable part of the language learning process. Of course it takes time but it makes students more active thinking learners. After all teachers need to remember that the aim of assessment is to improve performance, not merely to audit it.
One more basic factor in the success of learning is the mutual trust between the learner and the teacher. There are ways of making even the toughest moments of testing tolerable, if not enjoyable, for students. Teachers need to realize how much influence they have with their students. Because students do not just (or even) learn the subject matter we teach them; they learn their teachers. “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he/she is studying at the time. Collateral learning is the way of formation of enduring attitudes…may be and often is more important than the lesson in geography… or EFL… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future. (John Dewcy). So we, teachers, do in fact wield enormous power, and it is for us to decide how we’ll use it.
In conclusion it is important to mention that learning is a process of creating personal meaning from new information and prior knowledge. Knowledge is constructed. Learning requires organizing knowledge into patterns, frames, or central organizing ideas. Learning and performance are affected by motivation, effort and self-esteem. Hence the importance of the role teacher-as-coach and student-as-worker. New learning and teaching systems, open to all, are the keys to a brighter future.
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